Spain's jobless queue shrank in 2014 for the second straight year, the government said Monday, a fresh sign the economy is recovering from an economic crisis sparked by the collapse of a property bubble in 2008. The number of people in Spain registered as unemployed last year dipped by 253,627 from 2013 to 4.45 million, the labour ministry said in a statement.
It was the second yearly drop since a decade-long property bubble burst in 2008, throwing millions of people out of work. In 2013 the number of registered unemployed fell by 147,000 from the previous year, according to the ministry. "We have today 253,000 more reasons to be optimistic but there is still a lot to do to ensure an economic recovery and stable employment in our country," Spain's secretary of state for employment, Engracia Hidalgo, said in the statement.
The bulk of the new jobs that have been created are temporary ones. While the number of short-term job contracts rose by 12.6 percent to 15.37 million last year, just 1.35 million new permanent job contracts were signed in 2014, a rise of 18.9 percent. The registered unemployed list is a different measure from the benchmark quarterly unemployment rate published by the national statistics institute. The institute recorded 5.43 million unemployed in Spain at the end of September, yielding an unemployment rate of 23.67 percent.
That was lower than the previous quarter but still one of the highest rates in the developed world, second only to Greece in the eurozone. Spain emerged timidly from recession in mid-2013 and in the second quarter of this year posted its strongest quarterly growth since 2007, expanding by 0.6 percent.
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